Amazon Web Services is improving the performance of its DynamoDB database service with Parallel Scan, which gives users faster access to their tables.

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service that, like Amazon's other cloud services, promises to offload administration tasks while allowing enterprises to scale easily and pay only for what they use. The service stores data on solid-state disk drives and creates replicas in three different locations to improve availability.

The throughput of a database operation on DynamoDB has been constrained by the maximum performance of a single storage partition. Parallel Scan will change that by allowing tables to be logically divided into multiple segments and scanned in parallel.

For example, an application that processes a large table of historical data can perform a parallel scan much faster than a sequential one, Amazon writes in the DynamoDB developer guide.

Another addition is the ability to change the provisioned throughput of a particular DynamoDB table up to four times per day. This will allows users to react faster to changes in load, according to Amazon.

Amazon charges DynamoDB users for write and read throughput. The cost is from US$0.0065 per hour for every 50 units of read capacity and the same for every 10 units of write capacity. A unit of write capacity allows for one write per second for items of up to 1KB in size, for example.

Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services announced that the Management Console for the US GovCloud now supports Simple Workflow, which is an orchestration service for building scalable distributed applications.

The company has also upgraded its management platform DevOps with Elastic Load Balancing, CloudWatch integration for better monitoring, and support for additional EC2 instance types.

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